Monday, 25 October 2010

This Is It and I Am It and You Are It and So Is That and He Is It and She Is It and It Is It and That Is That

So this blog has been quiet for the best part of the year, but it anyone's still interested in following my writing I'll be posting about comics as Illogical Volume at the Mindless Ones site from now on.

My first post went up last night - it's called Etched Headplate, and it's a Vibrational Match style mega-essay onThe Bulletproof Coffin, and on what it is that we comic fans want from this thing of ours. The title comes from a song on Burial's excellent second album Untrue, which you should really make yourself familiar with if you haven't already. It's great, spooky dance music, just like dad used to listen to on the last nightbus home...

Toy Stories is all about Transformers, comic books, and some of Richard Herring's recent stand-up work. It's probably the most open essay I've put out there, and it's all about the way my childish fascinations have permanently damaged the way I think about commercialism and mortality. It was in the second issue of PEP!, which you can read here.

Illogical Volume is a full-blast, all caps noise-fest which spawned my new Mindless Ones name (it's a Marnie Stern riff, natch). This piece is mostly about Brian Chippendale's comics, but it sprawls out to cover all sorts of noisy rock shit in the Lightning Bolt/Marnie Stern/Fugazi axis too. The overarching question is how loud do you need to be to be heard through the illogical volume of society, or some other such high minded pish! This essay was collected in The Prism #1, the debut zine by the Mindless Ones, who I might have mentioned I'm writing for now? You can download the zine here, if you're interested, and believe me - you really should be!

All three of these zines include great work from writers like Sean Witzke, Andrew Hickey, Plok and my fellow Mindless Ones, but I'm being selfish here so I'll leave you to discover their contributions for yourself.

So, how to finish this? Well, I think I'll write one more post to close this place down. You see, I wouldn't have come back to blogging if it wasn't for Marnie's music, which gave me a massive kick up the arse in 2007. I decided to start this blog after reading the following paragraph in Plan B magazine, which seemed to me more of a mission statement than a live review:

I want to tell you something. Until she put her lyrics online I was labouring under the misapprehension that when Marnie Stern sang the chorus of ‘Vibrational Match’ she was singing, “I near it! I near it!”, using ‘near’ as a verb. To say you ‘near’ something feels archaic or scientific and certainly not part of spoken speech, whether that’s ‘nearing’ the Celestial City or ‘nearing’ orgasm or germination or maturity. No one would really ever say that, I thought, apart from Marnie Stern. I saw her going at something, something gleaming in the distance, and saying to herself in her high-pitched voice, “I near it!” I liked how weird that would sound in the context of a modern pop song, even if that modern pop song was an insane melange of vintage prog-isms, math rock, self-help art theory cheerleader chants and Van Halen riffs. Especially if. Even when I read that the line was actually “I’m near it”, it still tickled me. “Look up now,” she says. “There’s the diamond ceiling.” I look up and there’s a low roof patchy with condensation. I near it. I’m near it.

(Frances Morgan, 'Onwards and Upwards', Plan B #25)

But that was then and this is now, and I think it's finally time to shut this place down -- what better way to do that than to write a review of Stern's latest album? About which, more soon!

Thankfully (and unexpectedly) my decision to stop blogging here has precious little to do with my parents' health. My mum is now cancer-free and back up to full strength, and my dad is back to his eccentric best - both of them are far tougher and more dignified than I could ever be, and I genuinely don't know how they do what they do on a day-to-day basis.

I want to thank you all for your kind words, which really did help me out back in December, January and the other hard months at the front end of this year. My sister gets married at the end of the week, and my family will all be meeting up in Blackpool to celebrate this together - the simple pleasure this sentence gives me is beyond my ability to convey right now, if I'm honest.

In the end, the real reason I want to shut this place down is because I can no longer pretend that the story this blog exists to tell works for me. And if it doesn't work for me, what are the chances of it working for anyone else? Most of the narratives I'd built up to romanticise and justify my life have burned away during the last few years, and I don't have the heart to keep plugging away here in denial of this fact. All of which sounds both pretentious and cryptic, I'm sure, but as a jumped up dickhead called Groucho Marx once said:

If you write about yourself, the slightest deviation makes you realize instantly that there may be honor among thieves, but you are just a dirty liar.

Well ain't that the truth!

I want to keep writing and thinking and living and getting better at all of these things, and to be honest I reckon that if I kept this blog running I'd be tempted to fall back on the same old tricks over and over again, with diminishing returns and an ever-lowering post count. There's every chance that I'll do the same thing wherever I take my writing, but I hope not.

5 comments:

Yes, we'll always have The Filth: "Franklin remembered their last meeting in her office, when Slade had taken out his penis and masturbated in front of her, then insisted on mounting his hot semen on a slide. Through the microscope eyepiece Rachel Vaisey had watched the thousand replicas of this young psychotic frantically swimming. After ten minutes they began to falter. Within an hour they were all dead." -- 'News from the Sun' (1981) Ballard

I'm going to keep following you wherever you land, so it's not as if this is remotely goodbye...but this is good, anyway, to have a sense of ending for the blog, if not quite completion.

Your posts pushed me to read The Filth -- I would have gotten to it eventually, but you made it seem vital that I pick it up right away -- and then after I'd read it, this blog was like reading it while sitting next to someone smarter and cooler who recognized all the influences and connections hidden in the text, someone who flattered me by considering me cool enough to be worth sharing all those observations and insights with.

Well, I may not be quite cool enough, but I know good stuff when I see it.